My Blog July 22nd

I’m back from a couple of weeks of our Olympic training camp in Italy and just mapping out the rest of my year after the lads fly out to Rio in a couple of weeks.

Obviously, as I discussed a few weeks ago, it was a major disappointment missing out on selection but I’ve tried to keep positive and do what I need to do to keep myself fit and help the team in any way, as they put the finishing touches to their preparations for Rio.

We have a few days in Newport, at an Olympic holding camp next week, and after that my commitment is over and the lads will be jetting off to the Games and what I firmly believe will be a gold medal in the team pursuit.

The mood is positive among the lads and, generally, in the team so while a lot of experts think we won’t have the same success as we had in Beijing and London, I think we are still going to have a bunch of medals; some expected and some maybe a pleasant surprise.

Obviously, this close to an event like the Olympics, training and keeping fit and healthy is all that matters for the boys so training camps aren’t the most exciting places to be.

We were at altitude in Italy so one day we even had quite a heavy snow fall which livened things up a bit though we weren’t able to go out in it. We were scheduled to do a turbo session that day in any case so, fortunately, we did not miss out on a training session.

Instead, most of the time the lads seemed only to be interested in solving a Rubik’s Cube puzzle that Owain Doull had brought with him!

Believe it or not, Mark Cavendish introduced the Rubik’s Cube into the camp when we were in the States earlier this year. He has learned an algorithm - a sequence of moves in a particular order - which allows you to do it in a matter of seconds and was showing us how to do it months ago. I think it’s taken Owain all the time since then to learn it but, finally, by the end of camp he had managed it.

The Rubik’s Cube, and Pokemon Go, were about the only thing we had time or energy to do while we were in Italy and because the wifi in the hotel wasn’t great, even the Pokemon was hard to play!

On a serious note, it’s been great to see the Brits doing so well at the Tour and Cav, especially. The way he’s going, I wouldn’t bet a penny against him winning at least a medal, if not gold, in the omnium in Rio.

As for me, I have Ride London coming up in a couple of weeks, which promises to be fun, and then I might take a week or so holiday, to recover from this block of training, before coming back and pushing on for the rest of the road season.

But, wherever I am, I’ll be doing what every cycling fan in the country will be doing and finding a television to watch the Olympics.